The story was a recap of Ms. Quinn’s State of the City speech yesterday and said the address was reminder to “voters she is a liberal Democrat and distancing herself from Mayor Bloomberg as she gears up for a competitive 2013 mayoral primary.”

Ms. Quinn disagreed with that characterization.

“No. What I talked about, or what I hope I talked about were the issues that are really facing New Yorkers—education, housing, health care, unemployment issues for immigrants,” Ms. Quinn said. So it really wasn’t a speech to me about left or right. I think that is usually not a useful dialogue anyway. It was a question of how we make people lives better. How do we get people housing? How do we make their housing livable. All of the things I talked about there are issues I’ve worked on my entire career. I started out as a housing organizer so there is no change in my perspective at all in there.”

Ms. Quinn was also mentioned education, and said that she thought “the mayor has done a good job,” adding, “I think things are better and we should be proud of that but parents are right– we shouldn’t be satisfied.”

Mr. Kelly also asked her something that is on the minds of lot of New Yorkers–what is going to happen to this city when a billionaire like Mayor Michael Bloomberg is no longer in charge. Mr. Bloomberg’s money has led him to forego a lot of political compromises, and has allowed him to supplement programs that saw their budget cut with his own wallet.

Ms. Quinn conceded that she was “not a billionaire,” but added that no one who is talking about running for mayor is a billionaire either.

“It is going to be different. And maybe it’s going to be harder in a way but maybe its going to be better, because if you don’t have the money yourself then you have to go out and you have to build partnerships with business leaders with foundations, with communities and maybe those partnerships will give us better foundation to move forward.”